Sing to me, O woman, of your wrath. A book

During a recent conversation, I remarked to a colleague: “There is this marvellous book about women’s anger; I wish to write about it – it is a pity the author did not consult me while I was smashing chairs at home.” My colleague laughed, then replied: “That is a great book, full of temporal inversions. You must begin with the smashed chairs.”

The last chair—an old Indian chair—I smashed a few days ago, without an axe and without snakes in my hair, simply by sitting on it in a fit of rage; yet I too wish to travel back and forth through time, like Silvia Romani, who in Furiose—just published by Einaudi—explores the place of female anger in the ancient world. In myth, in literature, in that magnificent world of words and portraits pieced together by men, handed down by men.

Sappho of Lesbos never concerned herself with the women who unleashed hell; she who was the first to say ‘I, on the other hand’; she who was described by a poet as a petite woman ‘who nevertheless proved capable of subduing a rose’. As for the others, we have lost whatever they may have written. We know nothing of the others. ‘The most talked-about animal in the universe’, as Virginia Woolf wrote many years later, was discussed only by men. Thus, from its very origins, female wrath has been ‘the chromatic tone of a universe expressed in the masculine’. Perhaps this is why Achilles’ wrath is authoritative and heroic, whilst the rage of Clytemnestra, Electra and Medea is unhinged, frenzied and ruinous. It may be an unforgivable oversimplification, or a simple truth. In any case, it is infuriating, and there are almost no chairs left to smash.

Clytemnestra: wife, mother, lover, queen, murderer. Above all, the murderer of her husband Agamemnon, who returns in full armour from the war and whom she pretends to welcome with joy, preparing a hot bath for him. At the moment of his greatest defencelessness – naked, weary, trusting, relaxed – she kills him, with the help of Aegisthus (a secondary lover). In Nolan’s Odyssey, a film entirely devoid of eroticism, the only unsettling scene is that of Clytemnestra’s revenge, whose heart Aeschylus describes as ‘possessing a man’s will’. Fortunately, a day would come, almost two thousand five hundred years later (where did all that female rage go during those centuries?), when Marguerite Yourcenar, in her marvellous book Fires (1935), would take up her pen and have Clytemnestra say: ‘Now I shall explain everything to you, Lords of the Court… I killed that man with a knife, in a bath, with the help of that poor wretch of a lover of mine who could not even hold his feet… and in this brief space, not only my actions but also my motives must be brought into full light.’

Clytemnestra has many reasons to hate Agamemnon, who snatched her daughter Iphigenia from her and sacrificed her to appease the winds that were hindering the departure of his ships, and who, even before that, had ‘married her by force’, humiliated her with his mistresses, and reduced her – as she herself says ironically – to a ‘faithful bitch’ and then to ‘an obese cook’. There are other reasons, other children torn from her, and there is also her lost beauty: a rage that rises from the depths of her being and which Aeschylus cannot truly comprehend in all its magnitude and complexity. There is also love, which, despite everything, Clytemnestra felt for Agamemnon. And power, that thirst for power that makes Clytemnestra seem like a woman with a man’s heart. Because there is also this interesting aspect to the male perspective on female anger, and therefore to the universal perspective on female anger: up to a certain point, it is tolerated. Yet it is clear that women’s anger is a different kind of anger: it thirsts for revenge, yes; it is bloody, yes; it is discredited and morally condemned, but it is never one-dimensional. It is impossible to reduce it to a scream or a gesture; it is even impossible to quell it or seek repentance for it.

It comes from too far away; it has fed on so many hopes, disappointments, torments and silences; it has grown deep within, secretly nurturing excess. After all, who is more boundless than Medea, who wishes to rid herself of everything, above all else, of her condition as a mother? It was said that Euripides was a great hater of women, but the first noteworthy, three-dimensional portrayal of Medea is precisely his, because it offers us the abyss, the breaking down of boundaries, the apocalypse of emotions. Euripides does not reduce Medea to something merely banally wicked or fragile, but expands her into evil; he makes her reach out, relentless and persecutory in the imagination, right down to us, so mysterious, unblemished, never repentant; and Seneca, centuries later, has her say, after the murder of her children: "Medea nunc sum". Now, at last, I am Medea. Furious (Orlando Furioso is a teddy bear in comparison to her, as well as a fool who believes everything). Angry forever.

Silvia Romani, a scholar and lecturer in Mythology, Religions and Anthropology of the Classical World, and author of numerous essays (including, amongst others, the beautiful "Sappho, the Girl from Lesbos", published by Einaudi), engages not only with Aeschylus, Euripides and Ovid, but also with Calvino, Gadda, Pavese, Sartre, Woolf and Dickinson.

It searches everywhere – wherever it knows it will find them – for the traces, the words, the choreography and the images of this denied, restrained rage, for which a ‘correct’ measure is demanded that does not exist. If smashing a chair is already too much, what kind of excess does Medusa’s gaze represent, her hair, the Gorgon capable of instantly turning those who look at her to stone? Beyond the envy aroused by this power, this talent of the gaze, what lies within the semi-darkness; what happened to Medusa? For every anger stems from a wound that has never healed; every fury tells of something that happened and that brought about a metamorphosis. The anger that never passes. No one tells us anything about her; why is she so terrifying? Why must she be beheaded whilst she sleeps amongst her snakes? Ovid has Perseus recount this incidentally, having himself met ‘someone who had known her’. Just a few lines to say that Medusa had once been a beautiful young woman, desired, the object of admiring glances, with a marvellous head of hair. And she was raped by Neptune, in the temple of Minerva. We know nothing of Medusa before that; we do not know if she wept, nor how hard she tried to flee or to rebel. We know that she was transformed into a furious monster, whether as a reward or a punishment for a wound inflicted, for violence suffered (whereas the nymph Daphne, in order to escape Apollo’s rape, prayed and prayed and was transformed into a laurel tree: which is preferable? But above all: why aren’t the rapists turned to stone or transformed into trees instead?).

We are still astonished by the excesses of female anger, whilst the very young Cenide happens to meet Apollo, who, of course, rapes her on the shore and then, satisfied and generous, promises this young girl to grant her any wish. As Ovid recounts in *Metamorphoses*, Cenide asks to be transformed into a man, or at any rate ‘that I may no longer be a woman’. Apollo does not question the reason behind this terrible request, this immense pain, but immediately grants her wish. Cenide has barely finished speaking when her voice drops in pitch, hardens, and grows sombre. A man’s voice. Cenide becomes a warrior with an invulnerable physique, incredibly strong, who will withstand all spears, all the Centaurs, and who will vent his rage. Furious, buried beneath a mountain of logs, perhaps never truly dead, but in any case no longer a woman. Medusa grows angry and loses even her feminine beauty, becoming a petrifier; Cenide grows angry and rejects her entire womanhood, casting it aside in exchange for an invulnerable body. And she fights furiously.

Silvia Romani writes that the effect of this female anger, ‘observed through the male peephole’, is a sort of involuntary double-take: on the one hand, warnings, anecdotes and proclamations against female anger; on the other, however, a fascination. “With a somewhat voyeuristic instinct – perhaps one of which they were barely aware – the ancients recognised women’s valour and bestowed upon them powerful narratives, stories of intelligent rage: goddesses, heroines, ordinary women”. And the Erinyes, the Furies, the Gorgons. Women who, when wounded, unleashed hell. Each in her own way.

At this point, someone will say the same thing: don’t you think you’re overdoing it? You’re always getting angry. Look, you’ve lost your sense of irony. You’re aggressive. Since I can’t turn people to stone, I’d better choose another strategy: I’d better read, smash chairs, think about Clytemnestra – she slit her husband’s throat, took excessive revenge; is she madly happy? But she will be killed by her son Orestes, who must avenge his father’s death (a son whom Clytemnestra never particularly cared about, according to the ancient myth spied through the keyhole). At that moment, Clytemnestra will say: ‘Now I understand the words of the riddle: we shall die by deceit, just as we have killed.’ We shall die by deceit, or perhaps we shall learn something, make better use of all this anger, discover what Sappho was thinking. As for me, however.